A suicide bomber killed five people near police headquarters in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore Tuesday, an attack claimed by a Taliban faction as revenge for the execution of their comrades.

The blast hit just meters from an entrance to the police headquarters in the heart of the city, sending a column of black smoke rising above buildings.

Pakistani officials said Monday they had killed the mastermind behind a suicide bombing at a mosque which killed 61 Shiite Muslims last month.

The January 30 blast hit the mosque in the Shikarpur district of the southern province of Sindh as hundreds of worshippers attended Friday prayers.

Unidentified gunmen shot dead five customs officials patrolling overnight in Pakistan's restive northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, authorities said on Wednesday.

The gunmen attacked the duty officers at around midnight in Kohat city, some 80 kilometers (49 miles) southwest of Peshawar, capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Teachers in northwest Pakistan are being given firearms training and will be allowed to take guns into the classroom in a bid to strengthen security following a Taliban massacre at a school last month.

Heavily armed militants killed 150 people, 132 of them children, in a bloody December 16 attack on an army-run school in Peshawar, the main town in Pakistan's northwest.

Northwest Pakistan has been gripped by a raging Islamist insurgency for more than a decade, but a grim economic lifeline has emerged from the tragedy for some enterprising locals -- a boom in coffin sales.

Coffins are not part of traditional Islamic death rites in Pakistan, where corpses are normally bound in a funeral shroud and laid upon a rope-cord bed at the time of burial.

The leader of a Taliban group that killed scores of students in an attack at a Pakistani school last month has been added to Washington's official terrorism list, the State Department said Tuesday.

Maulana Fazlullah, sometimes known as Mullah Fazlullah, has been the leader since November 2013 of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has claimed responsibility for the Peshawar school shooting and numerous other attacks.

While last week's attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo sparked global outrage, dozens of people in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar paid tribute Tuesday to the brothers who carried out the murders. 

Though small in scale, the event was indicative of the anger that portrayals of the Prophet Mohammed can ignite in some parts of the Muslim world, particularly in Pakistan where tough blasphemy laws make insulting the Prophet a crime punishable by death.

Washington is to unveil Tuesday some $250 million in aid to back Pakistan's fight against militants and develop its unruly tribal areas as top diplomat John Kerry reportedly plans a visit to a Taliban-hit school in Peshawar.

Last month's attack on the school, which killed 150 people mostly schoolboys, has "unified the country in a way that they repeatedly describe as Pakistan's 9/11," a senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Kerry.

Schools in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar re-opened Monday morning for the first time since a Taliban raid massacred 150 people, mainly children, with returning students expressing defiance tinged with apprehension.

The December 16 attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar by a group of gunmen and suicide bombers prompted a bout of national soul-searching even in a country used to high levels of militancy, with the government moving to scrap a moratorium on executions and establish military courts.

Schools in the restive northwestern Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will re-open on Monday, an official said, after an extended break following a brutal Taliban assault which killed 150 people, the country's deadliest-ever attack.

Provincial Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani told AFP that "all the necessary security measures" have been taken for 35,000 educational institutions, including schools, colleges and universities to re-open on January 12.